Have you or someone you love been confused by the push to 'Make America Healthy Again'?Side effects may include: - Being inundated by uncredentialed wellness influencers and crunchy mommy bloggers selling supplements- Feeling perplexed by how RFK Jr. went from an 'environmental champion' to an anti-vax conspiracy theorist- Or maybe seeing the names Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz more and more in your feeds? Then you, my friend, are in dire need of our new series - The ROAD to Make America Healthy Again (MAHA). For the next few of weeks, we're delving into some of the origins, conspiracy theories, and power grabs that have led us to this moment, and what it could mean for our health. This week, we take on the crunchy conservative - but not without some help! Brittany sits down with co-host of the Conspirituality podcast, Derek Beres, and biomedical scientist, Dr. Andrea Love, to uncover how crunchy went from more liberal hippie tree huggers to more conservative conspiracy theorists.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
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Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce, and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident. Have you or someone you love been confused by the push to make America healthy again? Side effects may include being inundated by uncredentialed wellness influencers and crunchy mommy bloggers selling supplements.
Feeling perplexed by how RFK Jr. went from an environmental champion to an anti-vax conspiracy theorist. Or maybe seeing the names Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz more and more in your feeds. If that's the case, then you, my friend, are in dire need of our new series. The Road to Make America Healthy Again.
Don't you want a president that's going to make America healthy again?
For the next few weeks, we're delving into some of the origins, conspiracy theories, and power grabs that have led us to this moment and what that could mean for our health. Today, you and I are going to go down the crunchy to conservative pipeline with some guidance, of course.
Now, when you hear the word crunchy, you may think about hippies in the 60s and 70s or people making their own kombucha, you know, practicing veganism, folks with left-leaning politics who are living off the land, stuff like that. But these days, that's not quite right.
That also is a misnomer if you think it's only always been hippies or leftists, because the very ideology of conservatism is this notion of protecting what has already existed. And we want to keep perpetuating that.
That is Derek Barris, writer and co-host of the Conspiratuality podcast. a show dedicated to dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy mad yogis. And he says that the link between this return to nature ideology and conservatism is a pattern we've seen throughout history.
You referenced the 60s and hippies, well, you had the John Birch Society, which was a conservative organization in the 1960s that spread a lot of misinformation in order to drive people toward conservative values. That was agreeing with a lot of the hippies and actually influencing them at that time on things like fluoride in the water.
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